The chief executive of Dell Inc said yesterday that talk of IBM possibly buying Sun Microsystems was providing an "enormous opportunity" to the world's No 2 PC maker in the corporate server market.

Michael Dell said such talk created uncertainty over the future of Sun's Solaris-based servers and accelerated a customer migration to the servers based on standard industry components, known as x86 servers, which are Dell's mainstay product.

Apart from the potential IBM-Sun union, Dell is also facing an uphill battle with network equipment maker Cisco Systems with and Hewlett-Packard. Cisco has announced a foray into the server market and HP has started to offer a more complete package of technology services to its corporate clients after its purchase of EDS.